3“Free to Choose”

most influential arguments for economic liberalism to appear in the second half of the twentieth century. Capitalism and Freedom has been in print for the past forty years and has been translated into no fewer than eighteen lan-guages. At the time it was published, the book was not widely reviewed out-side of the main academic journals.1 But with the book’s publication, Milton Friedman staked his claim as a champion of economic liberalism at a time when the ideas of liberals (in the traditional sense) were distinctly unfashionable.2 Some twenty years later, in 1980, Milton and Rose Friedman made the case for economic freedom to a broader audience with the PBS television series and book Free to Choose. This book was highly successful, becoming the best-selling nonfiction book of 1980, and presented their agenda for reform. In the preface to the 1990 (Harvest) edition of Free to Choose, the Friedmans wrote of how sur-prised they were at the dramatic turning of the tide that had occurred in the 1980s. They were prompted to wonder whether the ideas in Free to Choose had become so much part of the conventional wisdom that the book was no longer relevant